Forest Gardening

Cultivating an Edible Landscape

by Robert Hart

234 pages, paperback, Chelsea Green,
1996

Blending history, philosophy, anthropology, and seasoned gardening wisdom,
the essays Forest Gardening describe the benefits of agroforestry
and explain how to create a forest garden.

Quotes from Forest Gardening

"For me the idea of a system of land use capable of supplying all basic human
needs, consisting mainly of trees and other perennial plants with no livestock
component, was a case of gradual evolution. While I was writing my first
book, The Inviolable Hills, Eve Balfour, one of the pioneers of
the organic movement and founder of the Soil Association, who wrote the
preface, sent me an article that I found more exciting than any detective
story. The author, James Sholto Douglas, described a new system of land
use that he was operating in the Limpopo Valley of southern Africa, which
I felt had worldwide implications. Called Three-Dimensional Forestry or
Forest Farming, it was pioneered by a Japanese, Toyohiko Kagawa, who will
surely come to be acknowledged as a universal genius on a par with Leonardo
da Vinci. Christian evangelist, scientist, novelist, poet, linguist, political
reformer, and one of the founders of the Japanese trade union movement,
Kagawa's concern with the total human condition was comparable with Gandhi's.
In the 1930s the focus of his concern switched to the plight of Japan's
mountain farmers, who were finding their livelihoods threatened by soil
erosion caused by deforestation--a problem that has since spread to many
other parts of the world. While studying at Princeton, Kagawa had come
across J. Russell Smith's classic Tree Crops--A Permanent Agriculture,
which emphasizes the value of the tree as a multipurpose organism, providing
not only food and a host of other useful products, but also protection
for soils and water supplies. Inspired by this book, Kagawa managed to
persuade many of his country's upland farmers that the solution to their
erosion problem lay in widespread tree-planting, and that they could gain
a bonus from this if they planted fodder-bearing trees, such as quick-
maturing walnuts, which they could feed to their pigs. Thus the three
'dimensions' of his 3-D system were the trees as conservers of the soil
and suppliers of food and the livestock which benefited from them.

"Impressed by the vast potentialities of '3-D' Sholto
Douglas, after meeting Kagawa in Tokyo, carried out a number of
experiments in various parts of southern and central Africa, in
conjunction with UNESCO, to test the applicability of the system
to different soils and climatic conditions. Among trees that he
found particularly useful were several leguminous bean-bearing
trees, especially the carob and mesquite, which fertilize the
soil for the benefit of grass and other plants by the injection
of nitrogen, as well as providing food for people and animals.

"While collaborating with Sholto Douglas in the preparation
of the book Forest Farming, which has been widely read
around the world, I gave much thought to the possibilities of
extending the system to temperate countries such as Britain.
Observing the habits of my own cattle, it occurred to me that
the traditional multispecies English hedgerow, which I saw being
browsed throughout the year, even in the depths of winter,
fulfilled some of the functions of Kagawa's and Douglas's fodder-
bearing trees. Moreover, after reading Fertility
Pastures by Newman Turner and Herbal Handbook for Farm
and Stable by Juliette de Bairacli-Levy, I realized the
value of hedgerow and pasture herbs, not only as adding agents
for the prevention and cure of disease. Some traditional
English farmers believed, I am sure correctly, that if a cow
felt she was sickening for some disease, she would seek out the
requisite healing herb.

"On the basis of these findings, I developed by own '3-D'
system, which I called OPS--Organic Perennial Subsistence
farming. That involved 'cultivating' my hedgerows by
encouraging the growth of plants that contained substances
particularly nourishing for cattle, such as the elder, wild
rose, and hazel, and sowing some of the many perennial pasture
herbs recommended by Newman Turner, such as chicory, ribwort,
yarrow, and sheep's parsley.

"But my primary aim was self-sufficiency, so I extended my
system beyond livestock farming to include trees and other
plants--mainly perennial--which would contribute to the health
and welfare of human beings. In time, after I had adopted a
vegan diet and for other personal reasons, the plant component
completely replaced the animal one, and, after making a study of
companion planting, I renamed my system 'Ecological
Horticulture' or Ecocultivation.' I then discovered that other
people were working along similar lines in other parts of the
world and that the generally accepted generic term for all such
systems was 'Agroforestry.' So I adopted that term for my own."

. . .

"From the agroforestry point of view, perhaps the world's
most advanced country is the Indian state of Kerala, which
boasts no fewer than three and a half million forest
gardens. The state, a long, narrow strip of land between the
Western Ghat mountains and the Arabian Sea, stretches down to
India's southern tip. Though it is the most densely populated
state in India, much of the land is infertile, acidic, and badly
drained. Large parts of the coastline are marshy or comprise
mangrove swamps, which are subject to periodic flooding and
tidal waves. But the energetic, cheerful people, with a strong
instinct for survival, have found constructive answers to most
of their problems. And the leading, comprehensive answer is, in
many cases, the tiny family forest garden with a wide diversity
of plants and livestock and connections with local industry.

"Forest-garden-related industries include rubber-tapping,
matchmaking, cashew-nut-processing, pineapple canning, the
making of furniture, the building of bullock-carts and
catamarans, the manufacture of pandamus mats, oil distillation,
basket-making, and the processing of cocoa and of coir-fibers
from coconuts. Many families are even self-sufficient in
energy, running their own biogas plants, which are fed from
human, animal, vegetable, and household wastes. The slurry from
these plants, combined with crop residues and the use of
nitrifying leguminous crops, eliminates the need for bought
fertilizers. As an example of the extraordinary intensivity of
cultivation of some forest gardens, one plot of only 0.12
hectare (0.3 acre) was found by a study group to have twenty-
three young coconut palms, twelve cloves, fifty-six bananas, and
forty-nine pineapples, with thirty pepper vines trained up its
trees. In addition, the small holder grew fodder for his house-
cow. Most gardens throughout the state have canopies of
coconuts, towering over a multilayered structure of different
economic plants. The name Kerala, in fact, means 'Coconutland.'
"

"Because of these family forest gardens, most people in
Kerala are to some extent self-sufficient in the basic
necessities, above all food. Therefore, poor as they are, they
are far better nourished than most other Indians. They can
enjoy the two basic essentials of a nourishing diet: fruit and
green leaves. Most Indians never see their national fruit, the
mango, vast quantities of which are exported, fresh or in the
form of chutney. But the Keralese grow their own mangoes n
their own forest gardens, together with some sixty other
nourishing food and fodder plants, medicinal herbs, and spices.

"The Keralese forest gardens are very intensively planted, on
several levels, like the natural forest, so that their
cultivation, the processing of their products, and looking after
livestock provide full-time healthy occupations for most members
of the families involved, which average six to eight people."

. . .

"There is a staggering neglect, not only of useful plants but of
areas where useful plants can be grown, as indigenous peoples
know. Areas such as the rain forests, with their vast diversity
of plants whose uses are known or remain to be explored, are
ruthlessly destroyed, to be replaced by pastures designed to
provide a single food product--beef--in infinitesimal quantities
compared to the productivity of the natural forest. The
wastefulness of 'orthodox' agriculture and horticulture is
unspeakable. Because it 'pays' best to specialize in only one
product at a time, all other plants are neglected or destroyed.
In exploiting a tropical forest for the sake of a single timber,
such as mahogany or teak, all other plants, and even up to
eighty percent of the timber trees themselves, are abandoned.
Modern plant-breeding techniques have evolved the possibility of
still further increasing the range of useful plants available,
but many 'improved' hybrids can only flourish if heavily dosed
with chemical fertilizers and sprays and copious irrigation,
which puts them beyond the reach of all but the richest farmers
and landowners. Hence the failure of the much-heralded 'Green
Revolution' to solve the heartbreaking problems of food
shortages in the Third World."

. . .

"In his landmark book, The One-Straw Revolution,
Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka argues in favor of a 'do-
nothing' agriculture, one that focuses only on those tasks that
are absolutely necessary to ensure natural order and balance.
'When you get right down to it,' he writes, 'there are few
agricultural practices that are really necessary.' "

. . .

"A forest garden requires thoughtful planning at its
inception, and lots of work to get it planted and well
established. Yet as the garden's trees, shrubs, and herbaceous
perennials mature, less and less effort is needed to maintain
what has become, in effect, a largely self-regulating system.
Rather than having to do all of the tilling, raking, seeding,
transplanting, and other tasks required in an annual garden, a
forest gardener need only perform regular maintenance--simple
tasks that soon become an enjoyable extension of ordinary walks
and daily observation of plants in the garden. Judicious
pruning or weeding keeps plants in balance with one other.
Mulching deeply with organic materials enriches the living soil,
conserves moisture, and suppresses weeds. Harvesting is
probably the most time-consuming task in the forest garden--and
picking fresh, delicious food for the table on a daily basis is
the one chore that almost no one finds onerous or tiresome."

. . .

"An old orchard makes a very good nucleus for a forest
garden, unless the trees are severely diseased. My forest
garden was planted in a twenty-five-year-old small orchard of
apples and pears, some of which were in a pretty poor
condition. But the abundant aromatic herbs that have been
planted beneath them seem to have rejuvenated them; a decrepit-
looking 'Red Ellison' apple was given a new lease of life when
Garnet grafted three young 'King of the Pippins' shoots onto it--
a trick that was known to the ancient Romans. These old trees
constitute the 'canopy' of the forest architecture. If one is
starting a forest garden from scratch, the best way to form a
canopy is by planting standard apples, plums, or pears at the
recommended spacing; twenty feet each way. Then fruit or nut
trees on dwarfing rootstocks can be planted halfway between the
standards, to form the 'low-tree layer,' and fruit bushes
between all the trees to form the 'shrub layer.' Herbs and
perennial vegetables will constitute the 'herbaceous layer,' and
horizontally spreading plants like dewberries and other Rubus
species, as well as creeping herbs such a buckler-leaved
sorrel (Rumex scutatus) and lady's mantle, will form the
'ground-cover layer.' For the root vegetables, mainly radishes
and Hamburg parsley, occupying the 'rhizosphere,' a low mound
can be raised, so that they will not be swamped by the herbs.
As for the climbers that constitute the 'vertical layer':
grapevines, nasturtiums, and runner beans can be trained up the
trees, while raspberries and hybrid berries, such as
boysenberries and tayberries, can be trained over a trellis
fence, forming a boundary to the garden."